Artwork Appreciation
The United States’ Manhattan Project successfully produced nuclear weapons, which not only hastened the outcome of World War II, but also marked the official entry of human civilization into the nuclear age. The artist Lo Sheng-Wen developed his “Falling Dust” series from this historical reality. The fallout and radiation from nuclear test explosions had significant impacts on the natural ecology of the test areas. However, this part of the history disappeared in the public mind—it was almost as if it did not exist. The “Trinity” in the title of this work is the code name for the first-ever atomic test explosion, which was equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT. Lo used official information published by the United States to find the coordinates of the test explosion site and other information and captured a three-dimensional satellite image of it from Google Earth. After some adjustments, the traces of the nuclear test site were reproduced, and the data turned into an actual image, to make people aware that this incident really occurred.